


It's a Jungle in Here

by Sholio



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Humor, a little background Peggysous
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-08
Updated: 2017-06-08
Packaged: 2018-11-10 15:25:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11129562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: There's a small situation at the L.A. office. Small. Tiny. Minuscule. Hardly worth mentioning, really.





	It's a Jungle in Here

**Author's Note:**

  * For [irisdouglasiana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/irisdouglasiana/gifts).



As he politely ushered Senator Brandt out of the taxi, Jack hoped his nervousness didn't show on his face. He told himself there was nothing to worry about. Everything at the L.A. office was surely fine and not about to go sideways in typical Carter-Sousa fashion.

He hoped.

"So this is the L.A. branch office we've been paying for," Brandt remarked, straightening his jacket (a few drops of sweat glistening on his forehead in the California heat) as he looked up at the facade of the Auerbach Agency. "Doesn't look like much, I have to say."

"And the New York office looks like a phone company from the outside, sir," Jack pointed out with a smooth grin. "All the infrastructure is on the inside. Let's get into the air conditioning, shall we?"

_Let's hope Peggy hasn't managed to destroy too much government property in the three months I've been back in New York and she's been on loan to Sousa's office, shall we?_

The thing giving him fits of nervousness was that no one had shown up to pick them up from the L.A. airport, and no one had responded when he'd tried to call the agency. He had covered as best he could, smoothing over the awkwardness and pretending it was all part of the plan, but he had a feeling Brandt was already suspicious that all was not well.

Jack kept a smile plastered on his face as he opened the door for the Senator. His chest gave a twinge; it still hadn't quite healed up entirely. (Peggy insisted the New York damp was to blame; in Jack's opinion, it was worse whenever he was here, as if his entire body knew that he'd almost died here.)

He really hated L.A., and he had a bad feeling he was about to hate it more when this visit was over.

"All you and Carter have to do is make nice with the DC brass for a few hours," he'd told Daniel over the phone. "Think you can handle it?"

"I know how to schmooze, Jack," Daniel had said testily.

"Yeah, well, the budget for your entire department is riding on it, so you'd better."

There was nothing obviously wrong in the interior of the Auerbach Agency -- nothing on fire, no one in handcuffs -- but Rose was already on her feet, rushing toward them. "Oh -- Chief Thompson! And you must be Senator -- er --"

"Robert Brandt." He shook her hand, but Rose was distracted, her attention mostly on Jack.

"So the visit is -- today, then," Rose said with a bright smile. "That's really excellent. Senator, why don't you have a seat here -- no, not that chair, that's the uncomfortable one. We put gravel in the cushion to discourage anyone from sitting on it. The comfortable chair is here, right here -- can I get you a drink? Tea? Coffee?"

"Rose --" Jack began. He broke off as he thought he heard a muffled thump through the ceiling.

Rose gave him a fast headshake and a brief, wide-eyed look. "Yes, that's the chair right there. Here's a glass of water for you, Senator -- and I'll just take Chief Thompson here to announce you --"

She dragged him out of sight, around the corner into the filing room where the entrance to the office was hidden. Jack scuffed some dead leaves out of sight with his foot -- on top of everything else, it looked like Sousa was getting slack about housekeeping around here; they'd need to have a talk about it.

"What the hell's going on, Rose?" he whispered, reaching for the handle to open the hidden door.

Rose's hand shot out and she seized his wrist. 

Jack looked at her hand clasped over his wrist, then at her face. She had the grace to look embarrassed, but held on.

"Don't open that _quite_ yet," she whispered. "I need to ... uh ... explain something."

There was another distinct thump, and Jack looked up, startled, as a bit of dust sifted down from the ceiling. He thought he might have heard a muffled yell, too. It would've had to be pretty loud to make it through all the soundproofing in the upstairs floor.

"Rose," he said, with a hint of danger in his tone, "would you care to tell me what's going on?"

"Yes, well. About that, Chief. There appears to be a small situation upstairs."

"Small?" Jack said.

"Small. Tiny. Minuscule, even." Rose held her finger and thumb a fraction of an inch apart.

Jack's patience -- already frayed after sixteen hours of travel time and three different airports, all in the company of a sixty-year-old man who smelled like cheap cigars -- was wearing to the breaking point. "Rose, in two seconds I am opening this door --"

"I _really_ don't think you should --"

"-- unless you tell me what's going on up there, right now."

This was punctuated with an impossible-to-ignore series of thumps coming from the ceiling.

"Everything all right in there, Thompson?" the Senator called from the next room.

"Fine, sir! Just fine!" Jack shouted back, and leaning closer to Rose: "Agent Roberts, so help me --"

"First of all, I want to reassure you that Mr. Stark --"

"Oh God," Jack groaned. "Of course Stark's involved somehow. _Of course._ "

"-- thinks the situation is well in hand, and -- Oh no." She was still holding Jack's wrist, and she gave it a sudden, sharp tug. "I wouldn't stand there if I were you."

He started to ask why not, but a loud cracking sound from the ceiling let him know exactly why not. He and Rose flung themselves into the back of the filing room just as the ceiling ruptured and a dark, writhing mass of something incomprehensible plunged through in a shower of plaster dust.

Jack slowly straightened up -- he'd attempted to fling himself over Rose -- and squinted through the dust cloud. The air had a weird smell, sharp with chemicals and a heavy, sweetish odor that made him think of his mother's garden from when he was a kid. The collapsed ceiling had yielded to a great, dark, lumpy mass, some of which was dangling down from the ceiling like vines or -- 

No, it actually _was_ vines, wasn't it?

Somewhere in the mass of vines in front of him, something was moving. He reached under his jacket and put his hand on his sidearm, as the new arrival struggled, thrashed, and finally managed to push aside enough tangled vines to stand up.

For a minute they stared at each other. Then Peggy -- and it was definitely Peggy, covered though she was in vines and sap and some kind of dark coveralls -- smiled and said brightly, "Chief Thompson! Hello! You're early!"

"Peggy!" Daniel's alarmed voice filtered down from above, followed by a muffled curse and a series of thumps.

"I'm fine, Daniel!" she called up. "I need more weed killer, please!"

"Peggy --" Jack began.

"Look out!" Peggy interrupted, pointing.

Jack looked down where she was looking, blanched, and sidestepped hastily away from a fat vine, which he was absolutely sure had not been there a minute ago.

Now that he was paying attention, the whole mass was ... Okay, he'd thought it just _looked_ like it was moving, because Peggy had just fallen through the ceiling tangled up in foliage (why, why, _why_ ) but ... no ...

"Is that thing moving?"

"Er, yes. They're quite lively, really. Excuse me --"

A metal canister thumped down in the mass of vines beside Peggy. She dived for it, and Jack noticed for the first time -- it had been hard to see in all the vines and sap she was covered in -- that she was wearing something on her back, fastened over her arms with straps and attached to a nozzle at her side. He'd seen fumigators use similar devices.

From somewhere on the far side of Peggy and the mass of increasingly lively vines, Brandt's disgruntled voice snapped, "I don't know what the hell is going on back here, but I've been on a flight for the last sixteen hours and I don't appreciate being kept -- Jesus Lord God, what in the name of all that is holy -- mmphhh!"

Jack knew he should be more concerned about the fact that his last hope of getting enough funding to keep the agency going was being eaten by a plant, but as vines writhed around them in all directions, he was much more concerned that he and Rose were about to be eaten too. He kicked one off his leg and grabbed hold of a tendril that had wrapped around Rose's arm, prying it off while she tried to extricate more of them from her hair.

"Carter!" he yelled. "Little help here!"

"Hold your breath!" Peggy called back from somewhere in the mess of vines. "This is going to sting! Oh, and Dr. Samberly says don't inhale if you plan to father children someday!"

"Wait, what?" Jack began, as a cloud of pink mist descended around him and the vines began to melt into dark sludge.

 

***

 

"For the record," Peggy said, "Howard is very apologetic about this."

All the doors and windows of the Auerbach Agency were thrown open, trying to get rid of the smell of sap, chemicals, and charred plants, but it was a lost cause. Someone -- Jack planned to find out who -- had had the bright idea of setting the vines on fire. He did have to admit that it had turned out to be pretty effective, and they'd managed to put out the fire before anything was lost except the second-floor men's restroom.

Senator Brandt had been taken to the hospital with contusions and a case of nervous prostration. Jack wondered if it would be possible to convince him that the entire thing was a hallucination brought on by too many hours on an airplane smoking cheap cigars.

From upstairs, through the hole in the ceiling, thumps and an occasional scream could be heard as a cleanup crew consisting mainly of junior agents dealt with the last of the vines. The charred, bruised, sap-covered senior agents were sprawled around on the talent office's collection of variably uncomfortable furniture, trying to restore themselves to something vaguely resembling their previous condition.

"You know," Jack said, scrubbing hopelessly at his hair with a wet towel, "I would ask what Stark thought he was doing, but on reflection, I don't really want to know." His chest ached, but he'd managed to get through the activity without any adverse health effects, which might mean he'd finally turned the corner and was, for a wonder, actually getting back to full strength.

Peggy and Daniel were taking turns washing the sap off each other while Jack kept an eye on them, out of the corner of his eye, to make sure things didn't get out of hand. "He was trying to invent a better fertilizer, I believe," Peggy said, tipping her head back; she was sitting between Daniel's knees while he gently combed sap out of her hair.

"You heard me say I _didn't_ want to know, right?"

Peggy smiled.

"Glad you're happy," Jack said, scrubbing vigorously at his hair. This stuff was _never_ coming off. "Because you two are the ones who get to come up with an explanation for all of this that's convincing enough to keep Brandt from lobbying the committee to pull our funding as soon as he's back in DC."

"Don't be ridiculous, Jack; we saved the man's life."

"It doesn't count as saving his life if you're the ones who endangered it in the first place!" Jack gave up on trying to get the sap out of his hair, heaved a sigh, and lay back on the couch he was sitting on. He wanted a drink. And a shower. And a new, less troublesome staff. "You couldn't even have postponed the disaster for _one more day,_ could you?"

"Next time we'll check with you before scheduling any new disasters, Jack," Daniel said solemnly, deadpan.

Jack raised one hand, carefully extended his middle finger, and let his hand flop onto the couch again. _Everything_ hurt, and he was going to be smelling that roasted-vine smell for the next week.

"Face it, Jack," Daniel said. Jack managed to muster the energy to rotate his head to the side, looking over to see that Peggy's head was flopped back in Daniel's lap as he gently teased at a tangle with the comb; she looked as exhausted as Jack felt. Daniel flashed him a quick, tired grin. "You miss being part of all of this. Admit it."

"Almost dying of something absurd, unlikely, and preventable every second Tuesday? How did I ever manage to get along without it."

He wasn't about to admit that they might be kind of, sort of, right. At the very least, the New York office had gotten a lot less interesting since Peggy left.

"You two are buying the drinks," he grumbled. "And I'm not moving from this couch until then."


End file.
